Kythibong Indierock | Alternative 8 Items

More than 10 years ago, Vincent Dupas, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy and Jérôme Vassereau created Binidu in parallel with their respective bands, Fordamage and Pneu, then very singular and of the most joyful french rock music. Their collaboration is a trek that started from green and sunny pastures to sink over time into mountains surrounded by storms. Binidu holds nothing back in composition, always ready to reinvent himself with each new album.

After "Yes", the first fresh and luminous one released in 2013, the second "Nouvel Ancient" in 2018, more adventurous and kind of lost in an apocalyptic world, the trio returns today just as adventurous but more in a peaceful way with "// ", a creation mostly focused on his appetite for the acoustics and electronics combination. A long-distance running music, which, from the top of the ridge lines, looks at the world with lucidity, embracing the entire landscape, valleys, towns, all the way to the sea.

It is their label, Kythibong, which, on the occasion of the festivities around his twentieth birthday, brings Binidu out of his brief hiatus. 2022 therefore sees the trio reunite and begin to compose a new repertoire with a strong desire to play at a low volume and thus be able to perform in a wide variety of locations. They then broached the composition of the third album changing their instrumentarium. The drums are now reduced to a split snare drum and a hi-hat, the modular synthesizers take an important place in the composition, Jérôme and Vincent play on small amps, the latter exchanges his electric guitar for an acoustic Parlor, and the sound of the voice is now devoid of any effect.

Over the course of rehearsals, Binidu starts to imagine “//” as an overall piece with five linked long compositions. Thirty-five minutes of music, alternating very acoustic phases and other electronic ones, creating supernatural spaces, moments of reflection, some pop, hypnotic and/or rhythmic bursts.

“In french, one can say that "the lake isn’t on fire", meaning that there is no rush. But what would a lake on fire look like?
This new Chocolat Billy album, as its title announces, tries to picture it.
The urgency is there, it is hounding us, informing, spreading, but it is embroiled in a “danceable solution” as Brian Ferry would have said in the days of Roxy Music.
With Chocolat Billy, we don't dance in circles, we travel in dreams in half-built landscapes. Jacques seems to be blowing in his tuba, which one imagines to be a little dusty, and this simple movement of air is
transformed into a note on the sax leading the path from the cave to the river.
Besides Jacques, (we will not know what happened to his various partners that we encountered in a previous album), we come across several families of figures. Où vas-tu Zolatale? "Au Cinéma" seems to answer the following title. And it is Italy on the Cinecittà side that we visit to the rhythm of a shimmering afro-beat, taking the time to salute the great Mario Bava, then a Mediterranean California of acid-synth Beach Boys. We enter in a huge apartment reminiscent of a tango, not Piazzolla's but Zbigniew Rybczyński's film. We even dance in the dark following a reptilian progression, disregarding the angles and walls that our swaying hips might encounter. And above all, we don't dance alone.
We do not shuffle; the tracks move forward, compact, on their sustained rhythms, but one can linger to whistle the Orientologist. The fire in the lake does not create a bubble and does not give in to panic, it is crossed by colored and sinuous lines which intertwine supplely but can sometimes break abruptly as the design of the cover suggests. "Scutigères flamboyantes vs rats de bureau versus", this intense text found on a flyer
at Novö Local, an underground concert venue in Bordeaux, seems to have drifted to finally find its place in the band's music. One can imagine that other materials that make their music so rich were picked up along
the way, kept aside, waiting for the right moment to use them, this little nothings, like Jacques with his found mask which is a bit old.
Whether for dance or for life, there is an urgent need to keep your feet on the ground. And if you catch yourself looking at your shoes, it's not "shoegazing" but it's to check that they will hold up. "
Jean-Francois Magre

In 2002, to provide on the spot a first act for a concert, seven people from Bordeaux accidentally named their very young formation Chocolat Billy. Quickly, the group tightens around four people but the name, although absurd, is preserved. The quartet then takes a liking to exchanging instruments, unless it is the instruments that take a liking in changing musicians.
The result, echoing this game of musical chairs, is at the crossroads of several sonic paths, a hybrid form, alternately playful and dancing free-rock, experimental pop, world noise, naive songs.
Composed collectively and as democratically as possible, the pieces of Chocolate Billy, albeit written, give the lion share to improvisation and elasticity.
They played left, right and center with Deerhoof, The Ex, Thurston Moore, The Osees and a whole gang of great musicians.
To date, seven albums have been released on the labels Les Potagers Natures, Kythibong and Frissons.
Armelle Marcadé Magermans, Jo Burgun, Ian Saboya and Jordan Pirozzi make up the formation today.
credits
released April 22, 2022